At Thames Gateway

A tribute from contemporary Estuary England to  S T Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”, as submitted to the Thames Gateway Bridge Public Inquiry by Janet in 2005

At Thames Gateway did Rogers Khan*
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Tamesis, sacred river, ran
Through transport corridor of man,
Down to Southend-on-Sea.

Then Government did command
A conference in London’s Dockland,
And midst this Rogers heard from far
Across the river voices prophesising war !
A montage of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves….
Government had failed to measure
Environmental impacts on the weather !

A planner and developer
In a vision once I saw,
With a traffic engineer,
And on his model he displayed
Complex forecasts overlaid.
What future held these three
For the Gateway Bridge Inquiry ?
At which junction, I awoke
And replied : The SEA, The SEA**

*Lord Rogers of Riverside  **Strategic Environmental Assessment

Michael Foster MP

Michael Foster
Came to Worcester
And trod in a puddle of rain
He trod in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never was seen again

Based on the nursery rhyme Dr Foster went to Gloucester (which also has problems with flooding !) Michael Foster has been the “New Labour” MP for Worcester since 1997

About Janet & Rocco

Janet Rocco brings together the talents of Janet (human) and Rocco (cat) in a Post-Modern – dare we say New Age – miscellany which includes :
Cultural Reviews
The Healing Arts
Literary Satire
Tarot Readings

Cultural Reviews
Our society has been called “broken”, but it is rather the mirror in which we behold this, our Culture, and, especially, The Media, which is broke. Janet and Rocco embark upon an exploration, or, more accurately, an excursion into our contemporary cultural capital.

The Healing Arts
We seek to (re) define The Healing Arts for the Modern Age. The role of The Arts is to restore balance and harmony in the individual and collective psyche. Our definition of “Healing Arts” includes Complementary and Alternative Medicine, as well as the “Creative Arts”.

Literary Satire
In the tradition of “The Water Poets” and Rococo Satirists, we endeavour to restore aesthetic and moral propriety, as well as a modicum of Common Sense, to a society which has certainly strayed far from the principles of good taste, misled as it is by material greed and technocratic hubris.

Tarot Readings
The “Cards” have been described as a “Window on the Soul”. We deploy their treasury to provide insights into both collective situations and predicaments, and individual destiny, offering interpretations rooted in contemporary reality as well as perennial wisdom and Universal Truth.

Janet & Rocco are available for :
One-off and Ongoing Commissions
Client Consultations & Readings

The Importance of Being Shocked (and Stocked)

 A L Kennedy had an important and urgent message on receipt of  the Costa award for best novel this month. She contrasted the kind of marketable books increasingly found on the shelves of high street booksellers, and those works with the power to change lives. Kennedy also strongly emphasised the importance of public libraries in preserving stocks of the latter, and providing life changing opportunities for self-education. Libraries are themselves now threatened with re-packaging as Information Stores etc, and their own book stores in danger of break-up.

The “shock of the new”, libraries and the issue of marketing are all relevant to a book I picked up the other week in Worcester City Library : still, but probably for not much longer, a pleasantly traditional version of this public institution, albeit with computers/ Internet access etc. I vaguely remembered the film version of “Last Exit to Brooklyn” from the 1980s, and was interested to “re-discover” this novel by Hubert Selby Jr, who in a retrospective forward notes the importance of the local library to the development of his own self-education and writing. The book also had a controversial UK debut in the 1960s as the publisher’s introduction explains.

It has to be said that “The Queen is Dead”, Part II of “Last Exit to Brooklyn” remains a deeply shocking narrative, even today where the issues with which it deals  – street violence, “Queer” baiting and bashing, homosexual prostitution, drug-taking – receive regular factual and fictional coverage. The novel is also works much “better” as creative art than my memory of the film version, the content of which I now have no recollection of at all, that’s how memorable it was ! Perhaps in their adaption to the New Media Age (and I’m not totally knocking this !) public libraries may suffer something of the same fate. Let’s hope not !

Novels that do “The Business” (& Those that don’t)

Head of the London Business School, former Bank of England Deputy Governor, and current Chairman of the Booker Prize Panel of Judges, Howard Davies recently complained that contemporary British novelists are not doing “The Business” ie not covering the worlds of commerce and industry like, for instance, their US counterparts.

Mr Davies pointed to the finalists for this year’s Booker Prize, the premier UK award for novelists, as an example of this. Amongst these is the eminent British writer Ian McEwan. Now I have to confess to having read only one of McEwan’s books, “Saturday”, and this technically accomplished novel left me more than a wee bit cold, I’m afraid.

Contrast this slight chill with my feelings about Tom Wolfe’s “hot” novel “A Man in Full”, which certainly does do “The Business”, for me anyway, on more than one level. This is a much fuller novel in all senses, and a much more satisfying experience for the reader. Like Mr Davies, I’m also asking why we Brits aren’t up to a work of the same scope !

Hello world!

Hi, I’m Janet Rocco. I’m more Jackie Brown, than Gordon Brown, or, for that matter, Jacqui Smith.